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Wednesday, 18 December 2013

The limitations of manliness in Dracula

The following was to be part of the postscript for That Line of Darkness: The Shadow of Dracula and the Great War (Encompass Editions, 2012) but
I instead decided to insert a Coda which examined the appeal of the
Gothic in our times. In retrospect, I think the right decision was made.
The original postscript works best as a series of blogs. This short piece concludes that series.

Bram Stoker

If Stoker conceived of Dracula as a critique of scientific positivism, he also challenges
the assumption that mental health can be best achieved through self-control
notwithstanding his expository writing wherein he explicitly champions the need
for self-censorship. One reading of Stoker argues that his novels and other
writings endorsed the need for restraint and the restoration of firm
boundaries, and from what we know about his life we can assert that fear of
disclosure and incitement of raw passions were overriding values. But his
ability to write in the Gothic genre allowed him to explore more subversive
ideas. For all his conservative values, there is evidence in this nuanced novel
of his tongue-in-cheek spirit to question the healthy male model of
self-control that was so esteemed in the late nineteenth century. Perhaps this
penchant reflected his Irish sensibilities and a wickedly perverse impulse to
turn an Anglo stereotype of the Irish back on its perpetrators. For years the
Anglo-Saxons had embodied masculine, virile qualities whereas the Celts were
condemned as emotionally incontinent, with a sensibility that exuded a soft
feminine quality with its “nervous exaltation.” This stereotype of the Irish
fits the description of female hysteria that Mina experiences, but as I tried
to demonstrate in That Line of Darkness: The Shadow of Dracula and the Great War, Stoker’s portrait of Mina is much more complex.

The male characters equal, if not surpass, Mina in
fretting about breaking down as the spectre of madness looms large for them.
Renfield is the only one that is certified a lunatic but he has more insight
into the dangers that Dracula poses not only for him, but also for Mina, than
the healthy men do. Jonathan Harker experiences “brain fever” as a result of
his forcible confinement and traumatic encounter with the three female vampires
while in Dracula’s Castle that leaves him feeling weak and diminished. His
somnolent ravings, his amnesia on waking, the resolution gone out of his eyes,
the relapse and subsequent amnesia one month after his wedding on seeing
Dracula ogling a pretty girl, are symptoms that Jean–Martin Charcot would have diagnosed as
male hysteria. Indeed, his hysteria was more acute than that experienced by
Mina. He does, however, acknowledge the support of Van Helsing, who has read
his journal and written to Mina, affirming the reality of what he experienced
in the castle even if it lies outside the boundaries of conventional science
and religion. John Seward, often depressed and even suicidal, constantly frets
about breaking down and going mad from which he protects himself through work—a defence that inhibits his professional development but possibly saves his
sanity. He often consumes drugs to sleep and worries about becoming addicted.
Since powerful emotions, especially in men, need to be contained and sanitized,
the act of writing permitted both expression of the words and the restraint of
feelings that would otherwise appear unmanly. To the embarrassment and
incomprehension of Seward, Van Helsing breaks into a fit of uncontrollable
giggles and tears after the death of Lucy. Manliness is not what defeats
Dracula; Mina’s hybrid of feminine compassion and masculine ingenuity and tough
mindedness are more germane. Stoker intuitively understood that the manly model
of emotional self-restraint and the constant exercise of will power by
themselves were inadequate tools to confront vampirism or the undead.

Had Stoker lived three years more, he would have
witnessed the powerful currents of World War Ι in which thousands of men
enlisted in a war that would severely test their manhood in ways that were
almost unprecedented and where the forces symbolized by vampirism re-emerged:
xenophobia, the blood lust and men trapped between life and death as the
casualties of severe war wounds or post-traumatic stress. In this tragedy,
reason and self-restraint were helpless before the maws of a technological war
devoured young men. In a small way, Dracula
portends what happens to healthy men when confronted by a powerful enemy
when terror and horror can reduce these men to a shadow of their former
lives when they suffered from shell-shock.

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That Line of Darkness: Vol. 2

That Line of Darkness: Vol. 1

About Me

Author of That Line of Darkness: The Shadow of Dracula and the Great War, Encompass Editions (2012) and second volume, That Line of Darkness: The Gothic from Lenin to bin Laden, Encompass Editions (2013).